By Grant Kelly, Contributor

[City Slang; 2025]

Rating: 7/10

Key Tracks: “Bad Apple,” “Company Culture,” “Filthy Rich Nepo Baby”

Who Let The Dogs Out is the debut full-length album by English punk rock band Lambrini Girls, following their critically-praised You’re Welcome EP released in 2023. On this album, the band members utilize punishing walls of distorted guitars and razor-sharp grooves as vehicles to vent their frustrations on a wide range of social ills. Though the album sits at a lean 29-minute runtime, the band’s scalding ferocity is sure to leave a mark on anyone that touches it. 

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Lead vocalist Phoebe Lunny’s makes herself thoroughly unignorable throughout the course of the record. On the opening songs “Bad Apple” and “Company Culture” (protests against police brutality and workplace sexual harassment respectively), her blunt, furious chants cut right to the heart of the matter and give the topics the unbridled outrage they deserve. 

The instrumental diversity of the album is another of its obvious strengths. You get straightforward, abrasive punk ragers on tracks like “Big Dick Energy” and “Nothing Tastes as Good as It Feels,” but the band maintains enough variety to keep songs distinct from one another. Tracks like “Bad Apple” and “Filthy Rich Nepo Baby” draw from the same punk rock formula, but are broken up at times by punchy, often bitterly sarcastic quips that both establish personality and keep things feeling visceral and spontaneous. On “Filthy Rich Nepo Baby,” in particular, the band fills in the space directly after Lunny’s wailing hook with a dissonant, piercing guitar chord that complements her vitriolic delivery exceptionally well. 

Other songs explore the band’s compositional tastes even further. “Love” takes on a more post-hardcore approach to dynamics with a droning opening guitar riff upheld by sparse, almost ritualistic drumming. The song becomes even more atmospheric as it goes along, though it never loses the urgent passion of its surrounding songs. The closing track “Cuntology 101” introduces synthesizers into the mix, which form into a strong rhythmic base for Lunny’s sassy declarations of self-love and sexual liberation. 

The only real complaint I have with the album is that some of the lyrical ideas come off as tired, and even a bit cringeworthy at times. Slang phrases such as “no homo” and “big dick energy,” though the band uses them sardonically, have been in the social media consciousness for such a long time that it feels as though they’ve already been mined for irony and criticism thousands of times at this point, and the band doesn’t really provide a sufficiently original perspective to their use. Other moments such as the middle of the song “You’re Not From Around Here”, where the listener is literally quoted the definition of gentrification, feel tacked on and minimize the impact previously being built.

That said, the album’s shortcomings are few and far between. Who Let The Dogs Out establishes Lambrini Girls as one of the most charismatic forces in modern punk rock, and will likely prove to be one of the most energetic debut albums this year. 

Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4GzF4Yg3GSkKi4hAzmjBKV